Phnom Penh – By day
The Garden Cafe was the venue for breakfast the next morning. The menu was huge and full of exciting breakfast things you’d get in a cafe on Bondi Beach. It was a hard decision but it’d been so long that I had to go for the baked beans and cheese. Even more exciting was Proper Coffee and the coconut shake that must’ve been entirely made of ice cream and coconut cream. Kinda funny that I lived to tell the tale of a breakfast like that.
The Garden Cafe was meant to be the home of another Seeing Hands massage place, but it had moved to somewhere nearby. We were getting hot and annoyed trying to find it so we instead decided to find a tuk-tuk. Much harder than you’d think. Phnom Penh was far bigger than any other place we’d visited and the tuk-tuks tended to loiter by the river in the centre of the tourist section. There were many motorbike riders offering to give us a lift, but these roads were far too scary and dangerous to risk such a thing.
Long story short, we ended up at the Tuol Sleng Museum and decided to stop in case we didn’t find it again. It was a truly horrifying experience. This place was a high school that the Khmer Rouge turned into a jail and interrogation centre. Very few people who went in ever came out. Especially troubling was that this happened less than 30 years ago. The records kept by the Khmer Rouge of S-21 (their name for the prison) were detailed and meticulous. Many of the rooms were filled with mug-shots of the prisoners – even toddlers and women with babies – as well as torture devices.
For an academic account of how s-21 worked you can read David Chandlers book Voices from S-21
Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison. I picked up a copy in a second hand store in Vientiane.
Our original plans to go to the Russian Markets were temporarily abandoned to instead have some quiet time by the hotel pool. Good thing we did because the markets, once we got there, were overwhelming. The aisles were only one person wide and the stalls were bursting with fake and real designer clothes, scarves, pirate software and anything else you could possibly want. We bought a photocopied version of the Bangkok Lonely Planet from a lovely lady with a badly scarred face. I bought some sweatshop Ralph Lauren shirts for my brother and yet another scarf for myself.